Sitting here today with my family (my mother and father in-law, my wife and two boys), I pause to reflect changing a life anniversary. Ten years ago today, I experienced my first Thanksgiving alone. Was not I just sit with other people who are not part of my family I was born to sit alone in a food court in a foreign land: 10,000 miles away from my wife and eight weeks old first son.
Ten years and two weeks I received a call from my mother, my father hadwas called Hit by a car half-way around the globe in a nation Dubai, where he works as a consultant. The details of how to live and work, he has enough to fill a book. Regardless, my mother was to me all the information they had, what had happened to my father - her husband - and we're trying to figure out what to do. We are trying to find out how long he would survive, and what that would mean survival.
We suspected that, with my mother to flyan Arab nation to negotiate with the people who are for women who used behind a veil, not the cleverest. I was not so enthusiastic about this prospect, because I knew that my mother was a much stronger negotiator than I am.
Twenty-four hours later I was on a 767 Boston Logan Airport Heathrow in London, and finally on to Dubai, courtesy of my father's employer in Dubai.
The trip was blurred book. I did not know what to expect. I knew my father had a T-12 burst fracture (fractureback), and a shattered pelvis. Calling on friends for advice, what does all this, my close friend from college had become an emergency room doctor was shining through the pelvis injury and any complications concerned that arise from these.
The only time my concentration was gone by this thought glasses were two thirds of the way through the leg of the seven-hour flight from Heathrow to Dubai. Sitting in the back area of the coach widebody AirbusWatch Bollywood movies speak in Hindi with Arabic sub-titles Sung, I noticed that suddenly, almost three quarters of the area got up and headed into the rest room.
One-by-one, those passengers in the restrooms so sharply dressed in western of Arab decent and leave as adult Arabs in their traditional Thoubs men and women in their hats Hejab.
Six hours later, after the fight with immigration officials in relation to an application, did not have themade through the proper channels, and learning the ins and outs of the crowd for the position in a "line" I stood in the apartment my father had worked in the past few months. I breathed a sigh of relief.
Culture here was very different from home in the States. In the three lines I had to wait for a visa to remedy the situation, there was never a line, per se, masses of people pushed against the window, behind which the people we need to see them all. Women have been technicallyallowed in these lines, but never seen. There was very little space between us, pushing against the window, but press was never allowed. I have this from when I shoulder my way into a room. Three men broke into Arabic, chastise, what I had done ... I think. What I needed time to observe was very nimble footwork, where the men would see a gap in the group and slyly slip their way closer to the window, all without anyone else.
The relief I felt in my father'sApartment was of short duration. At that moment I came face to face, as my father had separated themselves in a foreign country. A simple studio apartment with a hotplate, size in. the flat washer, which dried the clothing after washing was to them, and a small bathroom seems to be a temporary home, there were no pictures or evidence of a settlement for reasons that would (or) fill another book, my father had been overseas in the Mos Eisley Cantina - the bar scene from the first StarWars - and I began to feel very sad. He was alone in this strange land, and showed it to his home: His only connection to the family back to a phone line.
My sadness, my father had lived, but was quickly erased when I am one of the many people who had my father in the short time he had touched lived fulfilled. Every person I met, with whom he had worked, said to me: "Your father is a great man." After the twelfth person said to me: I was able to momentarily leavethe concern of my reason to be there to subside and the swell of pride to my father about me.
Later, I finally made it to the hospital in order to be with the doctors, as did my father, and check to see my father in the intensive care unit.
He was stable. He looked terrible. He looked old.
I know that last comment sounds strange, but in the time since I was the last time it seems a few years ago I was amazed at how much of this trauma at the age of it. The accident happened just three daysbefore, but he was emaciated, gaunt, and frail. No wonder, however. I learned from the doctor that while in the emergency room table, she had given him eight liters of blood. He had three broken vertebrae: one was shocked. He had a broken arm, a broken leg was probably broken bone fractures on the face and leg, that a piece of meat was taken, that was so deep that the bone was exposed. There was still an incredible risk of infection setting, and yet, when I came in andMy father saw me, he was the one who make me feel better. There it was: his smile.
Despite wispy, unkempt hair, and two days stubble, his smile lit the room.
He and I sat together for a long time. Well, it's been a long time for him. He fell asleep from time to time. We talked about everything to catch up - and kind, because we do not see each other more than two years - and he asked me to return to his office to try that three of the deals he had worked on close.As he was waking up from near-death experience, and he thought of his work.
The following days were filled with to kill the time between visiting hours at the clinic on foot to Dubai, and making phone calls trying hours, as much as possible about my father's injuries and what would be best for him. He needed surgery to stabilize his back: basically its fuse broken vertebrae, so that he could do simple things upright, like himself. There were two possibilities: with theSurgery in Dubai, or flying him back to the States.
During the negotiations, who would pay for the flight back to the States was a difficult task (at least a chapter) in a book, we are finally having my father arranged for the mountain. Sinai Hospital in New York City for surgery. The decision was cemented when I talk with my fifth emergency room surgeon who worked on my father - a Dubai national who had received his medical training in the U.S. - and I asked himabout what I should do. He said: "If he was my father, I would take him to the United States."
Even if the decision was made to the arrangement of transportation would be almost a week, which meant that I would be spending Thanksgiving in Dubai.
Thanksgiving in Dubai was just another day. The morning call to prayer from the minarets was heard on 4 The first hint of sunrise slipped over the dusty town on the 6, and I called my wife to check, as our son, and wishesGood night to her on Thanksgiving eve in Boston since Dubai's time zone is nine hours from Boston.
I showered, dressed and went outside into the building heat of the day and stopped at a cafe for a croissant and coffee. Visiting hours at the clinic did not start for another hour.
I finished my coffee slowly, then began the walk across town to the hospital.
My father and I an hour and a half together this morning. I alternated between sitting on a chair at the sidehis bed, where I would hold his hand, and at the foot of the bed, rubbed his cold feet, hoping against hope that this immobile feet, starting at the beginning to swell from its paralysis suddenly transmitting messages into his brain, I have to touch it. He continued about the sales he had worked, and how I could help him to conclude her talk, but we have never spoken exactly how bad his injury was, or what had happened. Once I had to have himSome forms for the hospital to release him to the Air Ambulance Service for her release and MRI, sign me. It was not until I took copies of the MRI that the air ambulance would take him to the U.S. market, I could go to hell, which had triggered in his body when the SUV struck him as he walked across the street two blocks from his apartment. I knew what was only the accounts of the emergency room staff and police officers, of whom I had accidentally foundmy father's personal belongings, which had evidently, from the pockets, such as water sprayed from a sprinkler head. My father did not remember anything.
As has happened since my arrival in Dubai, and my father drove up from sleep during the hour and a half I was there, and finally fell into a deep sleep. And as it did the other days during my time in Dubai, I sat and watched him for twenty minutes, grateful that my father was still alive.
The hospital staff was veryBear with me, and I often had my opening times a little longer than the generally Intensive Care Unit limited extension of hours. Finally, the simple need for food went to leave me to my father from the side.
Knowing that he and I were to go back to the states combined facilitated many of the fears that I had had since my arrival in Dubai. The fact that this day was Thanksgiving, and I was hungry, that it was noon, and that during my time of growing up Thanksgiving"Dinner was" always served at 2PM, inspired me to go to (the local market, a form of a grocery store), what kind of Thanksgiving, I could not find a surrogate to see.
The market had a single serving, pre-cooked chicken, which is more than enough for me. I was not really in the mood to sit alone in my father's sparsely decorated apartment at the moment, so I have a place in the public seating area that was found on one side of the market for people to sit and eat.
When I opened the chicken, Ipraying ... sort of. I am not particularly religious, so I think the more appropriate description would be to say, I looked at. I watched as my father had lived here so long that life in this strange country, so isolated from friends and family in the States. I looked like I got a new father, with an almost eight weeks old boy at home, which was already 30% more than if I had stayed for Dubai. I looked at the uncertainty, which now lay in front of my mother,and the rest of the family. I looked at how successful the operation could be for my father, understanding that the odds against ever in a position to have to run again. I watched as my son (and) now sons never know which patient man I knew growing up, she would never walk with him on the beach, or to him to show them how to throw a curve ball. I looked at all my anger and sadness and fear, is all just happened around, and everything about thebe.
And above all, I was grateful that at this stage of my life at that moment I had been able to spend at least part of it with my father.
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